Dr. Nathans, PhD, is a Pulitzer Prize winning historian of Jewish and Russian History who witnessed the dissolution of the Soviet Union during his Fulbright year.

Dr. Benjamin Nathans, PhD, is the Alan Charles Kors Endowed Term Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania, and an alumnus of the Fulbright Program. In 2025, he received the Pulitzer Prize in the category of General Nonfiction for his book To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause: The Many Lives of the Soviet Dissident Movement, a history of domestic opposition during the Soviet regime.

Nathans’s Fulbright year coincided with a pivotal movement in the history of eastern Europe. Mikhail Gorbachev was transitioning the Soviet Union from a communist state, and re-invigorating diplomatic relations with the United States through meetings with U.S. Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush.

Nathans recalls that the “Fulbright year (1991-92) was one of the most memorable periods of my life. I arrived in September in the Soviet Union, not long after the failed coup d’etat against Mikhail Gorbachev. By the time I left in June, the Soviet Union had imploded, replaced by fifteen separate countries, including Russia, where I conducted much of my dissertation research.”

“Living inside a collapsing superpower gave me visceral lessons in how history unfolds during moments of sudden acceleration. I have been drawing on those lessons ever since. It was also a heady time for researchers like me. Archives began allowing access to formerly sequestered document collections, making it possible to explore previously taboo topics – including that of my dissertation, which eventually became my first book, Beyond the Pale: The Jewish Encounter with Late Imperial Russia.”

Published in 2002, Beyond the Pale won the Koret Prize in Jewish History, the Vucinich Prize in Russian, Eurasian and East European Studies, the Lincoln Prize in Russian History and was a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award in History. Beyond the Pale has been translated into both Russian (2007) and Hebrew (2013).

Nathans reflects that he “could not have written that book [Beyond the Pale] without the generous support of a Fulbright Fellowship. Nor could I have immersed myself in the rhythms of life in the Soviet Union, an experience that laid the groundwork for my more recent work on the Soviet dissident movement.”

Nathans is also committed to making his cutting-edge historical research accessible to the public. From 2008 to 2012, he served as the chair of the international committee of scholars who designed and lent their expertise to the historical content for the Museum of Jewish History in Moscow, which opened in 2012. For his achievements and contributions to public discourse and culture, he has continued to receive notable honors such as a Guggenheim fellowship in 2012. He is the co-editor and contributor to two scholarly volumes, Culture Front: Representing Jews in Eastern Europe (2014) and From Europe’s East to the Middle East: Israel’s Russian and Polish Lineages (2021).

His research has been forged through his own international education and engagement, and he continues to teach internationally. Nathans served as a visiting professor in the history departments of the École des Haute Études des Sciences Sociales in Paris, France in 2010 and more recently at University College London in England in 2022.

Nathans reflects, “I am profoundly grateful to the Fulbright Program for nurturing not just my career but my life.”